Makers (39 page)

Perhaps Gibbons can be afforded a little sympathy, though. His latest encounter with Florida law left him with a broken arm and it may be that the pain medication is primarily responsible for Gibbons’s fancy thinking. If that’s the case, we can only hope that his young, blond Scandie nursie will carefully minister him back to health (while his comrades rot in gaol around the country).

This organization needs to die before it gets someone killed.

Comments? Write to Freddy at [email protected]

Lester interrupted Suzanne’s phone-call to break in and announce that he’d run Rat-Toothed Freddy to ground: the reporter had caught the first flight from Madison to Chicago and then gone west to San Jose. The TSA had flagged him as a person-of-interest and were watching his movements, and a little digging on its website could cause it to disclose Freddy’s every airborne movement.

Suzanne relayed this to Perry.

“Don’t you go there,” she said. “He’s gunning for the San Francisco crew, and he’s hoping for a confrontation or a denunciation so that he can print it. He gets idees fixes that he worries at like a terrier, going for more bile.”

“Is he a psycho? What the hell is his beef with me?”

“I think that he thinks that technology hasn’t lived up to its promise and that we should all be demanding better of our tech. So for him, that means that anyone who actually likes technology is the enemy, the worst villain, undermining the case for bringing tech up to its true potential.”

“Fuck, that is so twisted.”

“And given the kind of vile crap he writes, the only readers he has are nut-cases who get off on seeing people who are actually creating stuff flayed alive for their failures. They egg him on—ever see one of his letters columns? If he changed to actual reportage, telling the balanced stories of what was going on in the world, they’d jump ship for some other hate-monger. He’s a lightning-rod for assholes—he’s the king of the trolls.”

Perry looked away. “What do I do?”

“You could try to starve him. If you don’t show your head, he can’t report on you, except by making stuff up—and made-up stuff gets boring, even for the kinds of losers who read his stuff.”

“But I’ve got work to do.”

“Yeah, yeah you do. Maybe you’ve just got to take your lumps. Every complex ecosystem has parasites after all. Maybe you just call up San Francisco and brief them on what to expect from this guy and take it from there.”

Once they were off the line, Lester came up behind her and hugged her at the waist, squeezing the little love-handles there, reminding her of how long it had been since she’d made it to yoga.

“You think that’ll work?”

“Maybe. I’ve been talking to the New Journalism Review about writing a piece on moral responsibility and paid journalism, and if I can bang it out this aft, I bet they’ll publish it tomorrow.”

“What’s that going to do?”

“Well, it’ll distract him from Perry, maybe. It might get his employer to take a hard look at what he’s writing—I mean that piece is just lies, mischaracterizations, and editorial masquerading as reportage.” She put her lid down and paced around the condo, looking at the leaves floating in the pool. “It’ll give me some satisfaction.”

Lester gave her a hug, and it smelled of the old days and the old Lester, the giant, barrel-chested pre-fatkins Lester. It took her back to a simpler time, when they’d had to worry about commercial competition, not police raids.

She hugged him back. He was all hard muscle and zero body-fat underneath his tight shirt. She’d never dated anyone that fit, not even back in high-school. It was a little disorienting, and it made her feel especially old and saggy sometimes, though he never seemed to notice.

Speaking of which, she felt his erection pressing against her midriff, and tried to hide her grin. “Gimme a couple hours, all right?”

She dialed the NJR editor’s number as she slid into her chair and pulled up a text-editor. She knew what she planned on writing, but it would help to be able to share an outline with the NJR if she was going to get this out in good time. Working with editors was a pain after years of writing for the blog, but sometimes you wanted someone else’s imprimatur on your work.

Five hours later, the copy was filed. She rocked back in her chair and stretched her arms high over her head, listening to the crackle of her spine. She’d been half-frozen by the air conditioning, so she’d turned it off and opened a window, and now the condo was hot and muggy. She stripped down to her underwear and headed for the shower, but before she could make it, she was intercepted by Lester.

He fell on her like a dog on dinner, and hours slipped by as they made the apartment even muggier. Lester’s athleticism in the sack was flattering, but sometimes boundless to the point of irritation. She was rescued from it this time by the doorbell.

Lester put on a bathrobe and answered the door, and she heard the sounds of the family Kettlewell spilling in, the kids’ little footfalls pounding up and down the corridors. Hurriedly, Suzanne threw on a robe and ducked across the corridor into the bathroom, but not before catching sight of Eva and Landon. Eva’s expression was grimly satisfied; Landon looked stricken. Fuck it, anyway. She’d never given him any reason to hope, and he had no business hoping.

Halfway through her shower, she heard someone moving around in the bathroom, and thinking it was Lester, she stuck her head around the curtain, only to find Ada on the pot, little jeans around her ankles. “I hadda make,” Ada said, with a shrug.

Christ. What was she doing back here, anyway? She’d missed it all so much from Petersburg. But she hadn’t really bargained for this. It was only a matter of time until Tjan showed up too, surely they’d be wanting a council of war after Freddy’s opening salvo.

She waited for the little girl to flush (ouch! hot water!) and got dressed as discreetly as possible.

By the time she got to the balcony where the council of war was under way, the two little girls, Lyenitchka and Ada, had gotten Pascal up on the sofa and were playing dress up with him, hot-gluing Barbie heads to his cheeks and arms and chubby knees, like vacantly staring warts.

“Do you like him?”

“I think he looks wonderful, girls. Is that glue OK for him, though?”

Ada nodded vigorously. “I’ve been gluing things to my brother with that stuff forever. Dad says it’s OK so long as I don’t put it in his eyes.”

“Your dad’s a smart man.”

“He’s in love with you,” Lyenitchka said, and giggled. Ada slugged her in the arm.

“That’s supposed to be a secret, stupid,” Ada said.

Flustered, Suzanne ducked out onto the patio and shut the door behind her. Eva and Tjan and Kettlewell all turned to look at her.

“Suzanne!” Tjan said. “Nice article.”

“Is it up already?”

“Yeah, just a couple minutes ago.” Tjan held up his phone. “I’ve got a watch-list for anything to do with Freddy that gets a lot of link-love in a short period. Your piece rang the cherries.”

She took the phone from him and looked at the list of links that had been found to the NJR piece. Three of the diggdots had picked up the story, since they loved to report on anything that made fun of Freddy—he was a frequent savager of their readers’ cherished beliefs, after all—and thence it had wormed its way all around the net. In the time she’d needed to take a shower, her story had been read by about three million people. She felt a twinge of regret for not publishing it on her blog—that would have been some serious advertising coin.

“Well, there you have it.”

“What do you suppose he’ll come back with?” Kettlewell said, then looked uncomfortably at Eva. She pretended not to notice, and continued to stare at the grimy Hollywood palms, swimming pools and freeways.

“Something nasty and full of lies, no doubt.”

Nerd Groupie Church Finds Fatkins Love with Ride Sidekick

Sources close to the Hollywood, Florida ride-cult have revealed that Suzanne Church, the celebrity blogger who helped inflate the New Work stock bubble, is in the midst of a romantic entanglement with one of the cult’s co-founders.

Church recently came out of retirement in St Petersburg, where she has been producing PR^H^H journalistic accounts of the new generation of Russian experimental plastic surgery butchers.

Church was lured back by the promise of a story about the ride-network that was founded by her old pals from the New Work pump-and-dump, Lester Banks and Perry Gibbons. Now on the scene are more familiar faces: Landon Kettlewell, the disgraced former CEO of Kodacell, and Tjan Tang, the former business manager of the Banks/Gibbons scam.

But not long after arriving on the scene, Church fell in with Banks, an early fatkins and stalwart of the New Work movement, a technologist who entranced his fellow engineers with his accounts of the New Work’s many “inventions”—prompting one message-board commenter to characterize him as “a cross between Steve Wozniak and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.”

Now, eyewitness accounts have them going at it like shagging marmots, as the bio-enhanced Banks falls on Church’s wrinkly carcass half a dozen times a day, apparently consummating a romance that blossomed while Banks was, to put it bluntly, a giant fat bastard. It seems that radical weight-loss has put Banks into the category of “blokes that Suzanne Church is willing to play hide the sausage with.”

All this would be mere sordid gossip but for the fact that Church is once again glowingly chronicling the adventures of the Florida cultists, playing journalist, without a shred of impartiality or disclosure.

One can only imagine when the other, financial shoe will drop. For wherever Church goes, money isn’t far behind: surely there’s a financial aspect to this business with the ride.

UPDATE:

Indeed there is: further anonymous tipsterism reveals that papers have been filed to create a “co-operative” structured like a classic Ponzi scheme, in which franchise operators of the ride are expected to pay membership dues further up the ladder. All the romance of Church’s accounts will certainly find a fresh batch of suckers—if there’s one thing we know about Suzanne Church, it’s that she knows how to separate a mark from his money.

Lester ran the ride basically on his own that week, missing his workshop and his tinkering, thinking of Suzanne, wishing that Perry was back already. He wasn’t exactly a people person, and there were a lot of people.

“I brought some stuff,” the goth kid said as he paid for his ticket, hefting two huge duffel bags. “That’s still OK, right?”

Was it? Damned if Lester knew. The kid had a huge bruise covering half of his face, and Lester thought he recognized him from the showdown—Death Waits, that’s what Perry had said.

“Sure, it’s fine.”

“You’re Lester, right?”

Christ, another one.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“Honest Fred is full of shit. I’ve been reading your posts since forever. That guy is just jealous because your girlfriend outed him for being such a lying asshole.”

“Yeah.” Death Waits wasn’t the first one to say words to this effect—Suzanne had had that honor—and he wouldn’t be the last. But Lester wanted to forget it. He’d liked the moments of fame he’d gained from Suzanne’s writing, from his work on the message boards. He’d even had a couple of fanboys show up to do a little interview for their podcast about his mechanical computer. That had been nice. But “blokes that Suzanne Church is willing to play hide the sausage with”—ugh.

Suzanne was holding it together as far as he could tell. But she didn’t seem as willing to stick her neck out to broker little peaces between Tjan and Kettlewell anymore, and those two were going at it hammer and tongs now, each convinced that he was in charge. Tjan reasoned that since he actually ran one of the most-developed rides in the network that he should be the executive, with Kettlewell as a trusted adviser. Kettlewell clearly felt that he deserved the crown because he’d actually run global businesses, as opposed to Tjan, who was little more than a middle manager.

Neither had said exactly that, but that was only because whenever they headed down that path, Suzanne interposed herself and distracted them.

No one asked Lester or Perry, even though they were the ones who’d invented it all. It was all so fucked up. Why couldn’t he just make stuff and do stuff? Why did it always have to turn into a plan for world domination? In Lester’s experience, most world-domination plans went sour, while a hefty proportion of modest plans to Make Something Cool actually worked out pretty well, paid the bills, and put food on the table.

The goth kid looked expectantly at him. “I’m a huge fan, you know. I used to work for Disney, and I was always watching what you did to get ideas for new stuff we should do. That’s why it’s so totally suckballs that they’re accusing you of ripping them off—we rip you off all the time.”

Lester felt like he was expected to do something with that information—maybe deliver it to some lawyer or whatever. But would it make a difference? He couldn’t get any spit in his mouth over legal fights. Christ—legal fights!

“Thanks. You’re Death Waits, right? Perry told me about you.”

The kid visibly swelled. “Yeah. I could help around here if you wanted, you know. I know a lot about ride-operating. I used to train the ride-runners at Disney, and I could work any position. If you wanted.”

“We’re not really hiring—” Lester began.

“I’m not looking for a job. I could just, you know, help. I don’t have a job or anything right now.”

Lester needed to pee. And he was sick of sitting here taking people’s money. And he wanted to go play with his mechanical computer, anyway.

“Lester? Who’s the kid taking ticket money?” Suzanne’s hug was sweaty and smelled good.

“Look at this,” Lester said. He flipped up his magnifying goggles and handed her the soda can. He’d cut away a panel covering the whole front of the can, and inside he’d painstakingly assembled sixty-four flip-flops. He turned the crank on the back of the can slowly, and the correct combination of rods extended from the back of the can, indicating the values represented on the flip-flops within. “It’s a sixty-four bit register. We could build a shitkicking Pentium out of a couple million of these.”